The Influence of Emotions in Embodied Agents on Human Decision-Making

Acknowledging the social functions that emotions serve, there has been growing interest in the interpersonal effect of emotion in human decision making. Following the paradigm of experimental games from social psychology and experimental economics, we explore the interpersonal effect of emotions expressed by embodied agents on human decision making. The paper describes an experiment where participants play the iterated prisoner’s dilemma against two different agents that play the same strategy (tit-for-tat), but communicate different goal orientations (cooperative vs. individualistic) through their patterns of facial displays. The results show that participants are sensitive to differences in the facial displays and cooperate significantly more with the cooperative agent. The data indicate that emotions in agents can influence human decision making and that the nature of the emotion, as opposed to mere presence, is crucial for these effects. We discuss the implications of the results for designing human-computer interfaces and understanding human-human interaction.